Needs must when the Devil drives. And this is not his personal devil, that makes him a remarkable man, but the Great Devil, Old Horny himself, who is the Contrary Destiny of so many proud folk.
William, not looking at all like a petitioner, confronts Mr. Bond, a powerful banker and a hard-praying Wesleyan, one of the real old school who may be heard to murmur Amen and Praise the Lord, during an especially powerful sermon.
“Oh, Mr. McOmish, times are not as prosperous as they may appear, and we have to be particularly careful at present about loans. And you are asking for a long loan, of course. Speaking simply for myself, there is nothing I should like more than to oblige you, but as a banker – no – I fear I could never justify it to my Board. It’s not a personal matter; it’s policy, you see.”
Thus it is also with Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Nickel, Wesleyans and bankers both, and elders of the church William had built. It isn’t personal, it is policy, that holy word.
(9)
IT IS AT THIS time that William meets with Mrs. Julius Long-Pott-Ott on Colborne Street, as she is stepping into her fine barouche; Sam Clough, her coachman, is holding open the door for her, and her foot is on the step. But she turns toward William, who has raised his hat.
“Oh, Mr. McOmish, I hoped to meet you! I have so much wanted to congratulate you on the new Grace Church. A truly fine building! Gives our little city a whole new appearance. And it makes me prouder than ever that it was you who built my house.”
“Very good of you to say so,” says William. But he does not smile. Is anybody watching him talking to this fine lady, whose scent of violets he detects? Will there be any talk if he is seen with her, lallygagging right in the street?
“I’ve thought – ” says Mrs. Long-Pott-Ott, “I’ve thought now and then, that I’d like a new interest. If you ever considered becoming a limited company – every thing in your control, of course, but with a source of capital – I’d be glad to talk about it.”
“Never thought of any such fool thing,” says William brusquely.
Mrs. Long-Pott-Ott has been snubbed and she knows it. But she is too clever and too rich to show resentment. Furthermore, she knows a thing or two, and is what the town calls “long-headed.” She smiles, and she has nice teeth, as well as hair that receives more than local attention.
“Well, think about it now,” says she. And steps lightly into the barouche.
The hussy, thinks William. To propose such a thing in the street! A sleeping partner – because that’s what everybody would call it. William McOmish has taken Louida You-Know-Who as a sleeping partner! The filth! No use even thinking what Virginia would say if she heard about it, even as a suggestion. A man as a sleeping partner, that’s business. But a woman! The business term takes on quite another significance, breeds filthy talk.
Meanwhile Ruin. What else was there?
(10)
LIKE SO MANY people who are obsessed by their personal problems, it never occurs to William that anyone else may be aware of them. But when William is known in every drugstore in town, and visits some of them as often as twice a week, with his somewhat dogeared prescription signed by Dr. George Harmon Vanderlip, his brother-in-law, he cannot expect it to be a secret. Drugstore clerks will talk; they know who puts faith in a special liver-pad, who drinks Peruna Tonic for Female Complaints (presumably unaware that it is simply sherry with a few herbs to make it bitter), who favours which of the sixty or more cathartics that they have on their shelves; much of their social success depends on their seemingly unwilling revelations of these interesting facts. And they know who asks for morphia. Asks for it repeatedly. Morphia is not a restricted medicine, although some caution is advised in supplying it. But when a man has an open prescription from a well-known physician, is a drugstore clerk to raise a question?
Thus everybody knows that William McOmish is an opium-eater. The expression has a horrendous, darkling sound, greatly appreciated by the gossips. Of course William does not eat it, nor does he smoke it, or drink it as do the users of laudanum. He injects it, for a reason that seems to him, and to Dr. George Harmon Vanderlip, his wife’s own brother and surely a man to be trusted, to be entirely sufficient. William is an asthmatic, and has been one since childhood, the illness increasing until it becomes intolerable.
So it was that the evil day came, several years ago, when Dr. Vanderlip, having given William a relieving jab in the solar plexus, said: “It’s absurd, Will, for me to have to come here to inject you every time you have one of these spells. I’ll give you an open prescription and a syringe, and you know by now what has to be done. The dose should be kept as low as possible; never more than seven grains a day, at most. And only when you need it, of course. You’re a man of good sense. You’ll be all right.”
William was not all right. The pressure of business, the excitement of doing his finest work, and the misery of his domestic life make his “spells” more frequent, and long before he has finished the great church he is taking thirty grains a day and often more. He needs it in order to keep himself up to the mark, because under the pressure of work he finds himself becoming dull when he needs to be sharp for his calculations. Sometimes his hands tremble, and a man with trembling hands is not in any state to do hidden dovetailing. Also his digestion is in bad order; he has a sour stomach, and he belches when he has eaten nothing and therefore has nothing to belch about. His natural irritability is becoming uncontrollable and he snarls when he does not mean to snarl. Almost the worst thing is his constipation; he takes a highly regarded aperient, a real blaster, but it is powerless, and his straining in what is delicately called “the little house” seems sometimes as if it would rupture him, and his heart protests.
All of these things are plainly the result of demanding work, and his only recourse is to the syringe and larger doses of his one friend, who brings calm, freedom from worry, freedom from pain, freedom from the terrible gasping when his lungs are filled to bursting with air which he cannot force out, when his head seems about to burst, and when he is afraid of death. Yes, afraid of death; he, a strong, highly intelligent, resourceful and skilful man.
It is astonishing that he thinks nobody notices. But as he laboured at the great church the Reverend Wilbur Woolarton Woodside and the banker-elders saw his inexplicable excitement, and his strange eyes, and because the word had seeped up through the social structure from the drugstore clerks, they know what is wrong. Mrs. Julius Long-Pott-Ott, who has broad experience of husbands and knows a man with a secret when she sees one, guesses what is wrong. But nobody likes to speak to Mr. McOmish about it, because he is forbidding and has a sharp tongue. And nobody speaks ill of Dr. George Harmon Vanderlip, because nobody who is not at least equally loaded with science and arcane knowledge likes to criticize a doctor. Doctors rank just below parsons in their special sanctity.
Bankers, too, are priestly men; priests of Mammon, that popular deity. Bankers never talk. Of course, being human, they may murmur something to their wives, who may say something under the seal of strict confidence to a friend. How then does the news spread so quickly that William McOmish, long known to be an opium-eater – that poor woman, those sad girls – is on the brink of ruin? Even more astonishing, that Louida Long-Pott-Ott has offered to bail him out, and he bit her nose off, right on Colborne Street. So Sam Clough says, to a few confidential friends, strictly under the rose, of course.
(11)
LIKE GIL, I am growing restless under the unrelenting, self-justifying narrative of Mr. McOmish. Like Gil I sense that there must be other ways of looking at this story. Now, suddenly there flashes on the screen what is plainly a group photograph of a family reunion; out-of-doors on a farm lawn, about forty or more men and women are standing in front of a house, from the upper windows of which hangs a banner which says, “Welcome Vanderlip-Vermuelen-Gage Family.” The colour is sepia – a light gingerbread brown. In the back row stand the men, most of them with their arms folded; the only fat one is obviously the detrimental Dan Boute
ll, and he is also the best-dressed. In front of them are the women, in chairs, dressed in everything from what was fashionable at the time and the place back to garments well-preserved for fifty years and perhaps longer. Among them I recognize my grandmother as a young woman, her gaze concentrated by a pince-nez; she is the only one of the group who wears spectacles. In age they range from youth to two old women, at the extreme ends of the row, who wear the frilled white caps, the shawls and the ample black skirts of a much earlier day. Sitting at their feet are children, the little girls dressed heavily and wearing button boots; the boys wear roundabouts, breeches, Windsor bows, black stockings and button boots as well. They all stare fixedly at the camera, except for one blurred child who has moved during the “time exposure,” of at least twenty seconds, demanded by the photographer.
I know them instantly, and with a certain shock. These are my forebears, on my father’s side, at least, and a severe group they seem to be. Is the severity the result of the “time exposure”? Is it merely the fashion of the day? Or have these people no wish to seem happy and approachable? It is easy to identify William McOmish, whose scowl marks him as a man to be reckoned with, a man of intellect, a man who can cast stairs that would defeat a lesser builder. But there are others whom I recognize, from half-remembered family tradition. There is Great-great-grandfather Nelson (born Trafalgar year), a beard well down on his chest, standing behind his wife, Alma Devereux; at the far left of the women’s row, that she-ancient must be Granny Sands, his great-aunt, whom he likes, purely in jest, to threaten with his buggy-whip. (“I’m going to touch you up, Granny; here I come; step lively, Granny. Dance, Granny!” “Oh, git along with you Nelson. He-he-he, my dancing days are over Nelson, and you know it!” “Come on, Granny, give us a little jig!”) Nelson was the joker of the party. The man with the long scar on his face must be Bug Devereux. So called because, when he was seventeen, his face swelled hugely and at last burst, and a great black bug crawled out of it, spread its wings, and flew away. It is received belief that at some time an insect must have laid eggs in a small cut on his face, and hatched there, and the bug is his sole claim to distinction. But there is a man widely known as Forty-Pie Doane, because he once devoured forty pies in a church pie-eating contest, and survived, as undefeated champion. He is as thin as a rail, and looks hungry. Only related by marriage but a man of grotesque distinction. There is Cousin Flint, short, small-headed, scowling; not a man I should like to meet in a dark wood. There is Ella Vanderlip, celebrated for her goitre, which is indeed prodigious. There is Cynthia Boutell, the sister-in-law whom William McOmish detests with his whole soul. And this old woman at the far right – it cannot be, but it is – Hannah Gage, last of the tribe to remember that long journey from New York to Canada; Aunt Hannah, now well over one hundred if she is a day, and famous for her determination to undertake any disagreeable task – “If anybody has to suffer, let it be me; I’m broken to it” – but who is never allowed to suffer because everybody knows that Aunt Hannah’s life has been a martyrdom to rheumatism, asthma, bad stomach, and immovable bowels. She is the improbable survivor of Anna Gage’s adventurous brood.
Some in the picture have dim remembrance, through family legend, of Hannah’s brother Roger, who had died at the Battle of Queenston Heights, in 1812, repelling the Yankee invaders who had come to liberate Canada from the British yoke and got a surprise. Roger’s name is on the monument on that victorious field. But virtually everyone in the picture remembers Grandmother Elizabeth herself, who, with her husband Justus Vanderlip, grew richer even than old Anna, from clever shopkeeping and land deals, and never allowed the memory of her brave brother Roger to grow dim. Elizabeth, in the memory of all in this picture, finished her life as a smiling matriarch, sitting in her parlour, passing the time agreeably with pinches of snuff from her tortoise-shell box, interspersed with peppermints from her other box, which was of real old American silver, brought from New York and one of the two treasures to make that far-off voyage. Elizabeth left the management of her household to her four daughters, while she gloried in the achievements of her seven sons – farmer, lawyer, doctor, two parsons, and two members of the newfangled Legislature (with their hands, said the envious William McOmish, deep in the pork-barrel). Is it by chance alone that none of these are present at this family affair? Busy men, of course, but surely they could have put in an appearance.
My forebears. I know that I am blood of their blood and bone of their bone, but they seem as far off and strange as so many Trobriand Islanders. Their clothes are good. That is to say, they are of hard-wearing, sturdy materials. But who can have made them? They do not seem to fit anywhere, and they have never known the touch of the presser’s goose. The men wear vast cravats, and some of the older ones wear black satin stocks, in which there are horseshoe pins, presumably of gold. Do they brush their hair, or claw it into a rough semblance of order? They have glaring-clean linen, though they are bathers-once-a-week – if so much; the Dutch concept of cleanliness. And the women! They seem not to have prided themselves on their appearance, though many of them wear heavy jewellery of jet and gold, assurances of substantial means. Only my grandmother and her sisters seem to have given any thought whatever to their appearance. Everybody over forty in the picture has a ravaged mouth, suggesting that few teeth have survived so long. Did these people know love, or laughter? Have – or had – these people wombs, testicles: it must have been so, but who would guess it from their outward being?
Then the rigid picture breaks up. The figures move, and I see them differently, though they are still strange.
Strange because they are chronologically absurd. There are people in this assemblage who have no right to be here, or certainly no right to appear at the ages they seem to have reached. I must remind myself: am I watching a movie, a work of art or at least of artifice, and has not the Director a right to do what he pleases with Time? Is not the cinema the place of dreams, the place of once-upon-a time? What I am seeing is not Ibsen’s Master Builder, which is apparent to the Sniffer, beside whom I am seated, or perched, or however my condition must be described. Nor is my time the chronological time he sees on his screen. Is this what McWearie, in his attempts to explain Tibetan belief to me, called the Bardo state? Am I not in pleromatic time, that embracing element which has nothing to do with the processional tick-tock, tick-tock of our time when we are – as we vaingloriously describe it – alive?
I cannot protest or question the truth of what I see. Whatever truth it possesses is certainly not the historical truth I have been educated to think of as alone worthy of trust. In what I am watching, Time is conflated, as indeed it must be in any work of art. It is merciful of Whatever or Whoever is directing my existence at this moment to show the past as a work of art, for it was as a work of art that I tried to understand life, while I had life, and much of my indignation at the manner of my death is its want of artistic form, dimension, emotional weight, dignity.
(12)
I FOLLOW THE figure of my grandmother. She moves with a self-conscious dignity that goes with the pince-nez. She is “a working girl” and proud of it, for that was not the condition of most women of the time. She is a secretary, invaluable to her boss, Mr. Yeigh, who is, like herself, of Dutch descent and often says to her, “We Dutch must stick together, Miss Malvina.” She knows not only the inner working of the large carriage and bicycle works of which Mr. Yeigh is the manager, but also the details of Mr. Yeigh’s hobby, which is bee-keeping. “Order me six five-banded Italian queens to be delivered as soon as possible, Miss Malvina,” says he, and she knows precisely what he means.
Why is she a working girl? Why is her sister Caroline also a secretary, working in the insurance company that is dominated by the energetic Dr. Oronhyateka, notable as one of the Mohawk aboriginals who has “made good” in the white man’s world? Why is their young sister, although only sixteen, already apprenticed to the millinery trade – for the poor child has petit mal which unfits her for secretarial wor
k? I know, of course, for have I not seen Mr. McOmish, a wrecked and ruined man, haranguing his son-in-law in the depths of the winter night? But how did it come about, what went before, what explains Malvina’s exaggerated self-confidence and propriety? What explains the look of fixed outrage, of monstrous affront, that I see on the face of Virginia McOmish, my great-grandmother?
(13)
NOW APPEARS a series of brief scenes from Malvina’s childhood and girlhood.
Here is a fine house in the clapboard mansion style of the early nineteenth century; it would have charm and an air of welcome if the blinds were not drawn to the sills, and the knocker on the front door muffled in crêpe. Inside, members of old Elizabeth’s family are gathered for the funeral of the matriarch, one of the survivors of the great flight from New York. In the parlour the men of the family are gathered, talking in hushed but not reverential tones, as the undertaker’s milliner takes their hats, one by one, and wraps them in the obligatory long crepe “weepers” for the approaching funeral. Another milliner takes the sizes of their hands, and outfits them with new black gloves – for this is a first-class funeral and no expense is spared. Old Elizabeth’s two black servants, Angeline and Naomi (themselves fugitives long ago from the Slave States), pass trays on which are small glasses of Elizabeth’s personal cordial, cherry whisky, made by steeping black cherries in the whisky-jug for six contemplative months. Sparingly taken it has prolonged Elizabeth’s life, and it now comforts the bereaved, some of whom require three glasses to steady their nerves.